Gritty and Real Pays, but So Does Persistence

It’s one dirge after the next on “Apologies” (Sweetworld), the latest album from the Austin singer-songwriter David Ramirez. That goes for the hopeful songs too, because in Mr. Ramirez’s hands hope is a tool of the doubtful, not the faithful. Take “Stick Around,” the most moving song here, on which he resiliently flips the rolling-stone touring-life narrative into a plea that he doesn’t sound confident will be answered:

Maybe I leave

’Cause I’ve yet to find someone

To look me in the face and say

“Stick around

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Megan and Liz have a hit with “Bad for Me.”Credit
Collective Sounds

I want you next to me

So stick around”

Mr. Ramirez is a resolutely hesitant singer, never pushing his hurt, letting it instead decay him from within. He’s studied his early Dylan, and his early Johnny Cash too, though usually all he wants to flaunt is his own haggard loneliness.

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David Ramirez’s work includes hints of Dylan.Credit
Betsy Lackey

Tim Vocals

By all means, download “Live From Harlem,” the first mixtape from the singer Tim Vocals. But fully to appreciate what he does, it’s best to turn to YouTube. In January came “Bags of the Sour,” sung to the tune of Drake’s “Marvins Room.” Tim Vocals stands in a building lobby, building a beat from chest pounds and finger snaps while his friends goof off behind him, and rewriting the Drake song from the ground up into a miasma of sex, drugs and violence. That’s the Tim Vocals way, taking familiar songs — on this mixtape, Kirko Bangz’s “Drank in My Cup,” Rihanna’s “Unfaithful,” even Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” — and reframing them as guns-and-drugs tales in a distressingly pretty voice that practically shivers, suggesting the clenched alto of a young Mr. Jackson, or even Frankie Lymon. Hearing that sugary voice put in service of such dark material is bracing and sometimes not-wholly-intentionally funny. On “Bust My Guns,” sung to the tune of Ne-Yo’s “Sexy Love,” he has unkind words, delivered sweetly:

If you feel like you too tough

And you feel you can’t get hit up

Go ahead and test my aim

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Bucky Covington builds on his “American Idol” background with his second album.Credit
Kristin Barlowe

Ooooh-ooh-oooh.

Janis Martin

It’s bracing how present Janis Martin sounds on the covers collection “The Blanco Sessions” (Cow Island). In the late 1950s, as a teenager, she was billed as “the female Elvis,” but her complete works from that era fit on one disc. After becoming pregnant, and being dropped from her label, she largely dropped out of sight, her contributions to early rockabilly in danger of becoming a footnote. These new sessions, produced by Rosie Flores, go a long way toward restoring her legacy and advancing it. At its best her voice is haunting and thick, as on the saucy “Long White Cadillac” and the comic “It’ll Be Me.” Featuring a crack band, including Bobby Trimble on drums and Dave Biller on guitar, this is a mature, convincing album. In 2007 a few months after these sessions were recorded, Ms. Martin died at 67. This is some epitaph.

Megan and Liz

Points for diligence: the homemade videos on Megan and Liz’s YouTube channel date back five years, when these fraternal twins were young and awkward and covering songs like all the other young, awkward children with access to video cameras and high-speed Internet. But unlike most of the rest of that group, Megan and Liz now have something else: a hit of their own. “Bad for Me” (Collective Sounds) is a tidal rush of teen spite, delivered with cheery plasticity: “This one’s for the girls messing with the boys/Like he’s a melody and she’s background noise.” Written by the twins with Martin Johnson (frontman of Boys Like Girls) and Rob Hawkins, “Bad for Me” is refreshingly pure pop, pure enough to be the soundtrack to a recent Macy’s commercial. Liz sings lead, and Megan takes harmonies, and together they’re peppy and irrepressible. But they’re hedging their bets. A few days ago they were back at it, posting a cover of Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to YouTube, in case their future is in singing other people’s songs, not their own. No need — they’ve graduated.

Bucky Covington

What Bucky Covington had going for him as a contestant on the fifth season of “American Idol” was his blatant country-ness. Just as the show began to see itself as a home for genre singers, not just all-purpose pop stylists — this was 2006, the year after Carrie Underwood won — in came Mr. Covington, all long, scraggly hair and chewy accent and uncertain stage presence, tweaking his presentation week to week, figuring things out on the fly. Six years later, on his second album, “Good Guys” (eOne Nashville), he’s found his footing but faces a different conundrum: What sort of country is he? His voice is all over the place — credibly gritty on the lovely, R&B-influenced “Hold a Woman,” or heavily processed on the uplifting “I Wanna Be That Feeling,” wistful on “A Father’s Love (The Only Way He Knew How),” the most affecting song here. That he’s mostly effective is a testament to his vocal charm, and maybe to a lesson learned from “Idol” — how to be many singers all at once.

A version of this review appears in print on September 16, 2012, on page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Gritty and Real Pays, But So Does Persistence. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe